Month: January 2012

Social networking has changed the way many firms handle customer service. And those same social networking sites have given other firms the type of PR headaches they have spent years studiously trying to avoid.

Learning how to make best use of social networking sites is vitally important these days. A growing number of companies are taken a carefully considered and measured approach to using social media channels to interact with their customers…and even to like them.

Customer engagement has never been so easy...or so immediate

These companies are actively engaging in a very public conversation with people who buy their products and services, causing a mini revolution in terms of traditional customer service.

Social networking is revolutionising customer service. There are more and more examples of companies using Twitter to deal with individual customer complaints and get … [Read More]

January may feel like a bit of blur. Christmas only seems as if it was yesterday and you are already waving bye bye to the first month of the year. But it’s not too late to focus on a handful of changes that could really make a difference to how you market your company in 2012.

Here’s what we think you should have on your radar.

1. Invest in content

We find that a lack of good quality content is the single biggest marketing barrier that our clients face on a day to day basis. Content more often than not ends up in a rush job with that empty feeling of “things could have been so much better”, or it is written by your marketing agency with very little client input provided. It is important that you realise it is you that live and breathe your products or services so … [Read More]

So you’ve got your great looking website with fantastic content that’s optimised accordingly now what? Well the next step in SEO is link building to your site. In Google’s eyes what other people say about you is extremely important and this is where links from other sites come into play.

If your using a SEO company like us for your optimisation you will hopefully have started to rank however to get above your competitors we will need to build the reputation of your site. One of the major areas of reputation building is creating lovely links from great sites that Google will see as valuable sources.

So.. How do we create these back links?

There are various types of links that you can get and they all require different attentions:

Editorial Accumulation

These are links that are given naturally by sites and pages that want to reference your … [Read More]

I waved goodbye to my last full-time role in the newspaper industry six years ago and immediately found myself embroiled in an online row regarding the quality of the blogs the company I had just left were introducing.

The subject matter of the blogs was not the issue. The poor spelling, grammar and overall style of many of the individual posts was, however, proving a major source of distraction and irritation.

It wasn’t just me complaining, regular readers were not impressed either. When such mistakes were pointed out, apologies were forthcoming…initially.

But there came a point when the newspaper, the bloggers and their editor went on the offensive and stopped apologising for the regular mistakes. “The rules have changed,” I was reliably informed. “This is blogging, it isn’t journalism. So that stuff about spelling and grammar doesn’t always matter these days.”

Google has just announced it will proceed to introduce a major update on its privacy policy and terms of service in an attempt to make using Google products a “beautifully simple, intuitive user experience”. It involves linking user data across its email (Gmail), video (Youtube), social-networking (Google Plus) and other services.

For example, if you spend an hour searching on Google (while you are signed in to a Google account) for the latest iPhone, the next time you log into YouTube, you might get recommendations for videos featuring the iPhone, along with ads for the iPhone and the nearest place to buy them.

These changes will take effect on March 1, and Google will be notifying users today via email and a notice on their homepage.

How is this different from what Google was doing before?

Google has always collected this sort of information, for example, you may have noticed … [Read More]